SOCIALBAKERS STUDY: 2012 Social Media Campaign of Mitt Romney

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1 SOCIALBAKERS STUDY: 2012 Social Media Campaign of Mitt Romney INTRODUCTION The 2012 Presidential election confirmed the vital role of social media in politics. During the Republican primaries, seven of the Republican candidates were battling it out on social media to raise awareness and support for their respective political campaigns. The battle didn t end there. During the general election campaigns, both candidates executed highly strategic social media strategies to increased fan growth, engagement rates, share ratio, and more. This case study will focus on the social media strategy and campaign of the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney. The Former Governor of Massachusetts followed in his father s footsteps by maintaining a similar political timeline becoming governor in 2003 and this year s Republican Presidential candidate. After raising millions of dollars, Romney began a successful Presidential campaign, complete with an international trip to meet heads of state and giving various local speeches to gain support for his party. In order for Romney to tackle the difficult task of running against an incumbent, Barack Obama, he strategically implemented a digital and social media team within his campaign agency, Romney For President.

2 BASIC FACTS: MITT ROMNEY S SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN Beginning in January of 2012 Romney had more than 1.4 million Fans and 219,000 Followers. During the Republican primaries, Romney s social media efforts were focused on maintaining support amongst his key supporters and resonating his political positions. On May 29th, Romney garnered the majority of Republican delegates, thus making him the unofficial Republican nominee. Upon becoming the official GOP candidate, there was a sharp increase in campaign funding. Romney For President hired Zac Moffatt as Digital Director and allocated additional spending towards digital and social media. Once Romney garnered the GOP nomination, he faced the challenge of combating Obama s already established social media presence. In June, Obama had more than 27 million Fans while Romney had roughly 2.16 million.

3 THE CHALLENGES: GENERAL ELECTION As previously mentioned, the largest challenge the Romney campaign faced was combating Obama s established social media community. Due to the fact that Obama was able to reach a much larger audience on social media, Romney s digital team wanted to ensure high levels of engagement were maintained while simultaneously generating Fan growth. A second challenge Romney s team faced on Facebook was that the majority of Facebook users visit the platform primarily to connect with friends or family. Additionally, Facebook users spend an average of 20 minutes on the site each day, which creates a deadline aspect to social media campaigning. Therefore, from the beginning of the campaign, it was essential to determine how to get Fans to interact with Romney s content. Additionally, once Romney secured the GOP nomination, his digital campaign team recruited 120 new members and the digital media budget increased exponentially - all of which happened in a matter of a few weeks. This signified that an ad hoc team was formed and needed to quickly ramp up Romney s social and digital campaigns.

4 SOCIAL MEDIA PLANNING AND STRATEGY From the very beginning, Romney s digital media team believed it was critical to maintain high levels of engagement as their fan base continued to grow. Although they firmly believed that fan growth was important to social media success, Romney s Digital Director, Zac Moffatt subscribed to the belief that you can buy Fans but you can t buy engagement. Therefore, maintaining high engagement was the foundation for determining all of Romney s tactics and strategies on social media. Romney s digital media strategy team needed to determine the right tone and whether to use the first or third person on Facebook and Twitter. It was concluded that the first person would be most effective on both platforms to convey the same speech style that Romney was using for his traditional campaign messages. Romney For President determined that Twitter would be used mainly for quotes from Romney and for increasing buildup around events, while Facebook would be mainly used for encouraging supporters to share Romney s content with Friends and for posting content after an event.

5 THE PLAN From the very beginning, Romney s digital media team believed it was critical to maintain high levels of engagement as their fan base continued to grow. Although they firmly believed that fan growth was important to social media success, Romney s Digital Director, Zac Moffatt subscribed to the belief that you can buy Fans but you can t buy engagement. Therefore, maintaining high engagement was the foundation for determining all of Romney s tactics and strategies on social media.

6 THE OUTCOMES: FACEBOOK Increased the number of Fans from 1.8 million at the end of May to 11.5 million at the end of October. Romney attracted significantly more Fans than Obama from July to October. At the end of August Romney had more than 4 times more new Fans than Obama. Romney outperformed Obama from June through October in terms of the number of Fan interactions. Romney had extremely high engagement rates, significantly higher than Obama s. Romney s engagement rate in August was an amazing 3.085%. Increased website traffic Facebook consistently acted as a platform to recruit more volunteers.

7 THE OUTCOMES: TWITTER Increased the number of Followers from 525,000 at the end of May to 1.65 million at the end of October. Romney had significantly higher engagement rates throughout the campaign than Obama. However, Obama consistently had higher Fan growth rates. This was a reflection of Romney For President s belief that Twitter efforts should focus on increasing quality and engaged Followers instead of solely net growth. Used for real-time engagement with their Fans and to identify trends that Facebook didn t catch. Increased website traffic. Twitter was used especially for increasing the visibility of local events via the use of hashtags.

8 POST-ELECTION ANALYSIS AND SUMMARY Overall, Romney performed extremely well on social media. To counteract the large disadvantage of facing Obama s large and established social media communities, Romney focused on maintaining high engagement rates to coincide with healthy fan growth. Romney For President tracked all of their social media efforts by creating their own key performance indicators, the most important being a metric that focused on engagement. Analysis of these metrics not only increased social media performance, but it also gave valuable feedback about the performance and effectiveness of Romney s political campaign. KEY POLITICAL ISSUES: RESOLVED VIA SOCIAL MEDIA Increase awareness about Romney s political campaign and his political position on key issues Increase website traffic Engage with supporters in real-time Expand the reach of posted content Increase visibility and promotion of events via localized content Successfully recruit volunteers Target content to promote the Romney cause in swing states The 2012 Presidential election was critical for illustrating the power of social media in politics. The challenges of facing an incumbent are difficult to overcome, and social media is no exception, said Zac Moffatt, Digital Director at Romney For America. Therefore, the Romney campaign focused its efforts on increasing fan growth, but most importantly maintaining extremely high levels of fan engagement. When it comes to political elections, engagement is the key metric for overcoming critical issues that make or break a political campaign. Zac Moffatt Digital Director at Romney For America Please don't hesitate to contact us at experts@socialbakers.com for more details about our online products and to find out how we can help drive your social media performance.